What's on Your Mind?

Amid dramatic disruption, what role should business play in building the future? Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky shares his candid perspective on business, politics, creativity, and AI—tracing from Airbnb’s humble beginnings to bold plans for the company’s future. Through a designer’s lens, Chesky also reveals the single question leaders must ask themselves, and explores how best to make tricky decisions in a volatile climate. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters …

U.S. quantum computing firm D-Wave Quantum has struck a deal with a company called Swiss Quantum Technology (SQT) to bring D-Wave’s Advantage2 quantum computer to Europe. The deal, which amounts to €10 million ($11.63 million), will see D-Wave’s quantum computer deployed in Italy, where it will play a role in supporting the Italians’ efforts toward large-scale digital transformation, D-Wave announced on Wednesday. It will be part of a joint effort—collectively called the “Q-Alliance”—between D-Wave and IonQ, another American quantum computing company. In its announcement Wednesday, D-Wave said little about what SQT does, and scant information about the compan…

It’s been two years since Howard Schultz retired from the board of directors of Starbucks, a company he founded and led for decades, but he still enjoys chatting with customers—as he did on Tuesday before sitting down for a wide-ranging interview with Dan Roth, editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. Schultz was curious to know what a customer thought of the coffee chain’s protein lattes that debuted last month and he says there’s no better place to source this information than one of the 40,000-plus Starbucks locations around the world. A sense of curiosity is important for a business leader, as well as a willingness to “be in the mud” and learn directly from customers, Schultz…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Speaking Tuesday at the National Association for Business Economics meeting in Philadelphia, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell offered his clearest reflection yet on the Fed’s pandemic-era mortgage bond buying. He acknowledged that the central bank may have kept purchasing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) for too long—but he also suggested that those purchases may have had a smaller effect on the housing market’s trajectory than some assume. “Regarding the composition of our purchases, some have questioned the inclusion of agency MBS purchases …

The week is not off to a great start for much of the internet. In the early hours of the morning Pacific time, internet users around the world began experiencing issues with accessing various apps, websites, and platforms. Shortly after, a culprit emerged: Amazon Web Services (AWS)—or, more specifically, an outage at Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Here’s what you need to know about the AWS outage and what websites are affected. What’s happened? At around midnight Pacific time, internet users around the globe began experiencing issues accessing high-trafficked parts of the internet. Websites like Reddit, services like Lyft, and even apps from resta…

Apple stock just soared to an all-time high, and it might be thanks to the new iPhone 17. On October 20, Apple shares (NASDAQ: AAPL) surged to more than $264 apiece, topping out their last peak at $258.10 in December 2024. As of this writing, the company is trading up 8% since the start of the year and more than 11% year-over-year. The spike appears to be a reaction to a study published today by the technology market research firm Counterpoint. According to the report, the iPhone 17 series has outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in its first 10 days of availability in the U.S. and China. While the numbers are not yet official (Apple is expected to share more d…

Shares in GSI Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: GSIT) are soaring for the second day in a row. The company, which specializes in semiconductor memory solutions, saw its stock price skyrocket 155% yesterday. Today, GSIT shares are up another 39% in premarket trading as of the time of this writing. But why? Here’s what you need to know. What is GSI? GSI Technology is a provider of semiconductor memory solutions. That means it specializes in developing memory chips and products that help process data. Though the company isn’t as well-known as the bigger semiconductor memory solutions giants like Micron or Intel, it has been a staple of the semiconductor industr…

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is seen as the top contender to buy Warner Bros Discovery, with analysts and experts saying the tech scion’s access to deep pockets and Washington ties give him an edge in what could be the media industry’s biggest merger in years. Fresh off the Paramount-Skydance deal in August, the newly minted media mogul is eyeing one of Hollywood’s prized assets that is home to HBO, Warner Bros Studio and a streaming unit with more than 120 million subscribers. His $60 billion approach was rejected by Warner Bros Discovery on Tuesday, Reuters first reported. But the company has put a for-sale sign and attracted other potential suitors includ…

Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isn’t just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized. The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having “too much money,” there are striking cultural differences. In wealthy, more econ…

UnitedHealth on Tuesday raised its annual profit forecast and said it aims to grow in 2026, in a sign that the turnaround efforts under new CEO Stephen Hemsley were gaining steam. Shares of the company rose more than 5% in premarket trading after the company reported better-than-expected quarterly earnings as the U.S. health insurer kept medical costs in check. The company had set a far lower profit forecast in July after suspending its prior outlook in May, which had sent its shares reeling. The healthcare giant now sees 2025 adjusted profit per share to be at least $16.25, compared with its previous estimate of at least $16.00, and above analysts estimate of…

It’s already been an exciting Major League Baseball season. And that excitement is clearly translating into the business and advertising side as well. Earlier this summer, Variety reported that ads for the MLB All-Star Game, which took place in July, sold out over a month in advance. On Monday night during Game 3 of the World Series, when the Los Angeles Dodgers won against the Toronto Blue Jays—which gave L.A. a 2-1 series lead and featured another significant performance from Shohei Ohtani—the game went to 18 innings and lasted six hours and 39 minutes. So what happens to ads when a game has extra innings? When a large tentpole tournament or games lik…

If you’ve been eager to try cultivated meat—meat grown from cells, without the need to raise an entire animal—your options, so far, have been limited. The innovation has only appeared on a handful of restaurant menus since its approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) But if you’re in the Bay Area, you’re in luck: Cultivated meat startup Mission Barns will be selling its pork meatballs (made with a base of pea protein plus the company’s cultivated pork fat) at Berkeley Bowl West, one location of an independent grocery store in California. It marks the first retail sale of cultivated meat in the United States, though the products are available for…

In April 2025, Lucy Guo became the youngest female self-made billionaire after Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, the company she cofounded with Alexandr Wang in 2016. Though Guo had left the company—which builds infrastructure and software to create AI applications—over disagreements with Wang in 2018, she retained her 5% stake in the business, which skyrocketed in value after Meta’s investment. In 2022 she reemerged with Passes, a platform that helps creators monetize their social media followings by selling access to exclusive offerings—from products and merch to pay-by-the-minute private phone calls. As of February, the company has raised a …

When Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, his AI-generated encyclopedia intended to rival Wikipedia, it was not just another experiment in artificial intelligence. It was a case study in everything that can go wrong when technological power, ideological bias, and unaccountable automation converge in the same hands. Grokipedia copies vast sections of Wikipedia almost verbatim, while rewriting and “reinterpreting” others to reflect Musk’s personal worldview. It could genuinely be conceived as the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful, and human. Grokipedia’s edits aggressively editorialize topics ranging from climate change, to immigration, to (of course…

Across the streaming world, companies have been focused on adding features that make their top-tier subscriptions more valuable to the users who consume their content. Anime streamer Crunchyroll recently added access to a library of digital manga for top-paying customers. Spotify—somewhat belatedly—has begun offering high-quality audio for its Premium subscribers. SoundCloud is taking a different approach. It operates a standard streaming platform, with 100 million licensed tracks. But SoundCloud also has an enviable base of creators—musicians, DJs, podcasters, and more—who have uploaded 300 million tracks on the service to reach fans and make money from their stream…

Flight delays continued at U.S. airports Sunday amid air traffic controller shortages as the government shutdown entered its second month, with Newark airport in New Jersey experiencing delays of two to three hours. New York City’s Emergency Management office said on X that Newark delays often ripple out to the region’s other airports. Travelers flying to, from or through New York “should expect schedule changes, gate holds, and missed connections. Anyone flying today should check flight status before heading to the airport and expect longer waits,” the social media post added. George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and…